‘History of Crime’ or ‘History of Sin’? — Some Reflections on the Social History of Early Modern Church Discipline

Abstract

The German reader is used to the existence of academic schools of thought who, whether young or old, at conferences or with the publication of collections of essays are mainly concerned with purity of theory rather than plurality of scholarly opinion. For that reason the book Crime in England 1550–1800 is particularly impressive,’ for here the procedure is the complete opposite. The editor, Professor Cockburn, and his ten co-authors invited a historian of great integrity to write the introduction to their publication; they could be certain that he would carefully examine the methodological and theoretical approach of the ‘Social History of Criminality’, then still in its infancy, and scrutinise its first substantial results with regard to their general historical soundness. And Geoffrey Elton — for it was he who had been asked to write the introduction — was prepared to check and critically comment on the evidence, argumentation and conclusions of a line of research which is altogether contrary to his own understanding of the historian’s task and method.² The contributors and the editor in his introduction obviously agreed on the maxim that ‘it is by isolating and correcting error that progress comes, and in the very difficult region of historical inquiry … the practitioner need not object to having traps and pitfalls pointed out to him’.³